Rep. Steve King: A Confused, Dirty Old Man

Rep. Steve King (R-IA4) is confused … or else he’s just a dirty old man.

“When you’re in the private sector … with God-given rights that our founding fathers defined in the Declaration, you should be able to make your own decisions on what you do in that private business,” King told the Des Moines TV station WHO. The Arizona legislation sought to give business owners the right to refuse service to customers on the basis of the owners’ religious freedom.

“Although it’s clear in the civil rights section of the code that you can’t discriminate against people based upon—and I’m not sure I have the list right—race, creed, religion, color of skin,” King said, “there’s nothing mentioned in there on self-professed behavior, and that’s what they’re trying to protect: special rights for self-professed behavior.”

King explained that he doesn’t “know whether it’s a choice or not” but that homosexuality exists on “some type of continuum or curve”—although he doesn’t “know what that curve actually looks like” ….

…. “The one thing that I reference when I say ‘self-professed’ is how do you know who to discriminate against. They have to tell you,” King said. “And are they then setting up a case? Is this about bringing a grievance, or is it actually about a service that they’d like to have?”

Sexual orientation does not warrant constitutional protection because it cannot be “independently verified” and can be “willfully changed,” King contended. The Iowa lawmaker linked his opposition to LGBT anti-discrimination laws with his long-running suspicions of hate crime legislation, which he described as “punishing people for what you think went on in their head at the time they perpetuated a crime.”

(Ashtari)

Where to start? Okay, how about with verification, since that one’s pretty straightforward:

(1) Watch gay pornography.

(2) Can you tell the difference?

(3) Just how should we verify gayness?

I mean, come on. It’s long been a joke that the party of “small government” wants to forcibly insert itself into people’s bedrooms. After all, it’s not the size of the pen, but how it is used to legislate.

Something to Keep an Eye On

“What was the point of all that? This just shoots you in the arm! It doesn’t make breakfast at all!”

—Peter Griffin

Sausage. Rube Goldberg. Speak nothing of the breakfast machine.

There are more elegant metaphors, but most involve some sort of mythic creatures, sci-fi awesomeness, or simply the hand of God. Oh, wait, I said mythic creatures. I don’t know, maybe we can low-bid for those witches from MacBeth.

Exhibit A: Beltway gossip.

Sen. Ted Cruz met with roughly 15 to 20 House Republicans for around two hours late Monday night at the Capitol Hill watering hole Tortilla Coast.

The group appeared to be talking strategy about how they should respond to a tentative Senate deal to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling without addressing Obamacare in a substantive way, according to sources who witnessed the gathering. The Texas Republican senator and many of the House Republicans in attendance had insisted on including amendments aimed at dismantling Obamacare in the continuing resolution that was intended to avert the current shutdown.

Sources said the House Republicans meeting in the basement of Tortilla Coast with Cruz were some of the most conservative in the House: Reps. Louie Gohmert of Texas, Steve King of Iowa, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Raúl R. Labrador of Idaho, Steve Southerland II of Florida, Mark Meadows of North Carolina and Justin Amash of Michigan.

The group is a collection of members who have often given leadership headaches in recent years by opposing both compromise measures as well as packages crafted by fellow Republicans. And, it seems, leadership unwittingly became aware of the meetup.

—Fuller

The appearance is obvious; Sen. Cruz is already known to be plotting against Speaker Boehner. The question at this point is what he thinks he is working toward.

Seventy-Five Pounds of Dope

“You’d need at least four or five immigrants, and mango-sized calves would do just fine.”

—Ryan Kearney

One of the challenges facing the armchair pundit, or even average voter in this age of industrial-grade politics is that one can effectively legitimize scandalous behavior through saturation marketing. Whether it’s waxing romantic about the wetbacks on his father’s farm, or finding women—invariably past their own fertile years—willing to say that Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock were right, or sending Rep. Marsha Blackburn out to put a feminine face on the proposition that women don’t actually want equal pay for equal work, Republicans just can’t seem to keep from choking on their own toes.

To catch every one of King’s offensive statements, one would need an army of trackers. To keep an accurate record of the insanity coming from the GOP’s vociferous hardline right wing would require career decisions.

Still, though, in the end, well, come on.

Lost in all the jokes about cantaloupes, though, was the real absurdity in King’s quote: that anyone could conceivably carry 75 pounds of pot. True, the weight itself is not necessarily prohibitive, though it would take a very fit, hydrated person to carry that much through the desert. But dried marijuana, no matter how “dank” its buds are, is not a heavy product by volume. Which is to say, it takes a lot of pot to get to 75 pounds. How much, exactly? This picture, from a 2011 post in Kansas City alt-weekly The Pitch about a highway bust, shows exactly that weight in marijuana. No backpack is large enough to fit this much bud. You’d need at least four or five immigrants, and mango-sized calves would do just fine.

I mean, you know. Any excuse to post a picture of seventy-five pounds of sweet and kind.

Many thanks to Ryan Kearney of The New Republic for putting that lovely two and two together.

And, yes, I would laugh if that was trafficked over from Kansas.